1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to reporting aggregate (i.e., total) power consumption by numerous systems. In particular, the present invention relates to reporting aggregate power consumption by numerous data processing systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data centers have provided a central location to house data processing equipment including networking equipment, telecommunications equipment, and storage equipment. Such facilities have historically managed the power used by the data processing systems.
Historically, power management was accomplished by measuring the power consumed by each of the data processing systems at the same points in time, i.e., at a given point in time, the power consumed by each data processing system would be measured, and the resulting power consumption values could simply be summed to arrive at a total power consumption for the aggregation of all data processing systems at that point in time. However, as the number of data processing systems increased, this synchronized measurement activity became very difficult to accomplish. First, polling more than a few data processing systems simultaneously is very difficult. Each data processing system is typically polled by a separate thread of execution within the program doing the polling, and the number of simultaneously executing threads is limited in practice to a few dozen or a few hundred at most. Second, the power consumption information may be returned at different times because of network or system latencies. Additionally, the use of different types of data processing systems with different power measurement circuits that update at different intervals makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to synchronize any measurement of power consumption.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method that provides the ability to measure the aggregate or total power consumed by a large number of data processing systems without requiring that each of those data processing systems be polled at the same points in time.